I’ve been a journalist for over 20 years. I began as a feature writer on the UK’s Independent on Sunday newspaper and set up as a freelance in 2000. Since then, I’ve written for many of the UK’s national newspapers and magazines, from the Financial Times and the Guardian to Country Living and Cosmopolitan, and I’ve interviewed everyone from A-list celebrities, businesspeople, sportspeople and musicians to teachers and teenagers, farmers and fashion designers, cooks and criminals – plus many others. I’ve also recently been back to university to pick up a second degree in psychology, because the human mind fascinates me. Everyone has an interesting story to tell if it’s presented well and that’s what I like to do.

Discover The Playable City: The Happy Face Of The Urban Environment

Clare Reddington is the creative director of Watershed, Bristol’s cross-artform venue and producer, an organisation that shares, develops and showcases exemplary cultural ideas and talents. In 2012 she coined the term Playable City and launched the first Playable City Award, a £30,000 international award, which sits at the intersections of art, technology and culture. The first winner, Hello Lamp Post, by PAN Studio, Tom Armitage and Gyorgyi Galik, turned Bristol into a diary by allowing people to interact with street furniture using SMSSMS. It was nominated for a Design Museum Designs of the Year Award 2014.

Watershed’s Playable City Award 2014 challenged artists and creatives from around the world to produce a future-facing artwork which uses creative technology to explore the theme of the Playable City. The winner, Shadowing, by designers Jonathan Chomko and Matthew Rosier, is a project which gives memory to Bristol’s streetlights, enabling them to record and play back the shadows of those who pass underneath. As you walk under the light, the shadow of the previous visitor walks alongside you. While you interact, or react, to the shadow, your movements and actions are recorded, becoming the shadow for the next visitor. If a visitor remains under the lamp, the lamp reaches further back in time, playing back the shadows of its previous visitors. Shadowing will be unveiled at the Making The City Playable Conference, which takes place on 10 and 11 September in Bristol.

Clare Reddington: bringing play to the urban environment

So: how do you make a city playable?

Cities are places where we work – busy, sometimes unfriendly places. But there’s still room for play

“There’s a lot of publicity around smart cities, future cities as big tech providers, but we’re trying to counter some of the difficulties around living in cities. Technology can be isolating; there’s a big drive towards efficiency and this can be unnecessarily screen-based. Technology is presented as making life quicker and predicting your needs but that means you don’t need to connect. We started thinking about play as a way of connecting and of giving the places we work in, live in and travel through a bit of lightness – a way to show that technologies don’t have to be isolating, they can be used for fun. The other thing is the sense of powerlessness in cities. We spend a lot of time wishing other people would fix stuff or do stuff. Play feeds the opposite, it gives people a sense of permission and ownership. You can do things differently, change things, make your own intervention.”

Getting a city to start playing …

“We’re not suggesting that we own this way of working – Playable City names a movement that happens in lots of cities round the world. But it’s very much of Bristol. Projects such as the Zombie Chase game and Luke Jerram’s slide paved the way for thinking about the city as a stage for these kinds of interventions – as a backdrop to make art with or for. Bristol sees itself perhaps as kind of a test bed: you can get things off the ground pretty quickly. People like to say yes. The city council is very pro pop-ups. We have a scheme called Playing Out which started here and is about closing roads for children to play and is now in other cities. Bristol is the perfect backdrop for testing ideas: we’re a small city, not London, and we can take permission for ourselves. There’s a real sense of getting things done. A marketing agency came in and did some city branding and what they noticed was a spirit of unorthodoxy. We have lots of street art, activists, organisations such as Sustrans and the Soil Association – there is a genuine sense of engagement. You could think of the city as an R&D development lab; it’s understood by the city, the council and the people. People here love testing things out, they like to get involved.”

Choosing winning concepts

“For both of the awards we’ve done, we’ve invited ideas from all around the world and a huge breadth of things have been pitched. Hello Lamp Post was the first winner: when we set up the award we were thinking it would go to a massive visual thing, some kind of visual extension of the city – and we funded something that was essentially invisible! But it sums up the Playable City: it wasn’t made for hipsters, you didn’t need any special technology to do it, there were no barriers to interaction. Technological barriers tend to make for small numbers of dedicated users. At the moment Watershed supports around 150 artists doing different work and innovating around media, but those are all works in progress, so we wanted something people could engage with that had a clear concept.

“There was an element of challenge in setting up as a commission for play: some people could have concerns about ‘organised fun’. Our conference in September will allow us to share ideas, see what’s possible, what could come next. With Hello Lamp Post last year, we didn’t realise how much we would learn about people’s likes, what inspires them, the tiny moments of family holiday fun they shared. Shadowing, this year’s winner, is very different, but again you don’t need any special technology. There’s something very elegant about the way people walking past a lamp post realise their shadow is doing something different and start playing with it. We’re slightly embarrassed that we’ve pursued two lamp post themes, but they are ubiquitous in the city’s infrastructure and we wanted to use that infrastructure.”

The learning process – and going global

“We’ve had huge amounts of interest in Hello Lamp Post going into Austin, Texas and I think it’s important what we can learn from other cities. A city isn’t one homogenous thing. We have very different understandings of public spaces and how to inhabit them. In the Middle East, the public spaces are the shopping malls. In Malaysia some of our projects would be illegal as people are not allowed to loiter! We are currently in partnership with the British Council and we are planning a global proposition; touring doesn’t seem to fully capture what we can learn from others so we’re starting to think about building a network of Playable Cities so we can think about how the works produced can have more than one or two iterations. I can’t wait! It feels very timely – and a concept that crosses borders quite easily. There is also a lot of a brand potential and a lot of brands have come to us to talk about what we’re doing. This wouldn’t be about compromising, but about scaling to reach more people. Branding these days can be much more subtle than it used to be; projects like the BMW Guggenheim Lab or the [former] Orange Prize for Fiction do it really amazingly, in a way that enhances what’s being done.”

Engaging everyone with technology and science

“It’s about literacy: the kind of literacy that gives you the ability to question. If people can understand and engage, they can say what they do or don’t want. The best things have multiple points of view, from the people who use them, the scientists, the artists – and then the better and more appropriate a piece of technology will be. Excitingly, it’s about inventing better things. We are consumers of technology but there’s no reason we can’t also be designers. This should be engaging everyone, including policy makers. Science isn’t a rarefied discipline – it exists in all of us.”

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